Make Your Own Laundry Detergent

September 17, 2013

You will not believe how simple this is to do, and the savings in your pocket will most likely astonish you as well.

But before I start gushing about how great this soap is…I want to apologize. We some gorgeous photos of each step, but alas, they have all been lost. It seems my computer caught a bit of a virus. I attempted to backup all my photos to an external drive. Sadly, it just saved shortcuts to the images, not the images themselves. Well, that does no good when you take and reinstall Windows. Can we say frustrated? I know I was. Not just for losing all the photos that were going to be in this post…but there was some other pretty awesome things too. And to make matters worse, after copying them from the camera to my computer…I deleted them from the camera. UGG!

OK, enough ranting and back to the soap.

Before making this detergent up, we were using the Purex all-in-one sheets. We loved them, I mean one sheet…and you get detergent, fabric softener, AND a dryer sheet! What is not to love about that? Sadly, they stopped making them. So standing in the store we looked at the prices…and I was shocked how expensive laundry detergent is (well not too shocked, as our local news was running stories on the Tide black market). So we went home and ran to our dear friend Google.

After a few searches, we came across tons of different versions of homemade laundry detergent. And even with those, there some that would not be cost effective to make. Others were very time consuming. But there was one that we had seen pop up over and over again, and it is this one that we went with, and are still using to this day.

You will only need 4 things to make this up:

Storage container (We bought the one in the photo from Big Lots for around $3)

1 box of Borax

1 box of washing soda

1 bar of Fels Naptha

Aside from the storage container, the other three things can be found in most big box stores, in the laundry aisle.

The hardest part to this is dealing with the Fels Naptha bar. Simply cut it into small cubes, and toss it into your blender. Pulse it until it breaks down into very fine pieces. Then mix it with the Borax and washing soda in your container. And you are done! It really is that simple.

All you need is 1 tablespoon per load. You can use two for more heavily soiled loads. Needless to say, one batch should last you for some time; unless you do 10 loads of wash a day. Now for what we did, making enough to last a year. If you triple the amounts of everything, you will end up with around 15 pounds of detergent. At one tablespoon per load…needless to say, we will be getting many many miles out of a few minutes of effort.

There are a few things you may need to know about though. First the smell. It does NOT smell pretty, but, after your clothes go through the wash, they come out with literally no smell at all. Secondly, this detergent is HE washer friendly, so you won’t get very many suds at all. This is also of no worry, as we have actually noticed stains that our old detergent did not get out…have all vanished! We have also noticed that our whites are actually brighter than they have ever been!

Aside from cleaner clothes, the other thing we love about this is the price. Not including the container, you can make a batch of detergent for around $7! That should make you and your wallet smile.

Needless to say, we could not be happier to have made this switch. Have you tried this detergent? If so, let us know what you think about it, especially compared to the more expensive varieties that are out there.